Our world is most notably characterized by lightening fast change. Bill Gates calls it "Business at the Speed of Thought." The assumptions of yesterday are already passé. Internet stocks are way inflated – why? Because they represent a fundamental shift in the way we do business. Because they assume a future, a huge future, which is yet to be determined. We know only this: it’s going to be big. Really big. And very different.

With each year that passes, we get deeper into the accelerated change curve. The line is going vertical and points increasingly skyward, like a Saturn rocket speeding out of the atmosphere into the stratosphere.

It is exciting. Exhilarating. Energizing. Stimulating. Motivating. Thrilling. And terrifying. All at once.

When Covey speaks of "paradigm shift," he is suggesting that there are different ways to look at the same phenomena. Your paradigm may be quite different from mine. The model (paradigm) we use to explain things can become irrelevant in the blink of an eye.

Most of us see reality through the filter of our personal experience. We make judgments and predictions and decisions based on our current capacity for understanding. But then something happens that changes everything and our prior assessments become immaterial. Vaporized. Gone. Boom. Paradigm shift.

It can happen in an instant.

Up until this week, I served on the board of directors of a non-profit corporation. The phone rang on Tuesday. Our chairman resigned. Our President resigned. I resigned. Boom. Paradigm shift.

Also this week, I toured a brand new church facility. The renovations are nearly complete. This visionary group of believers imagined that a former mental health facility could be converted into a church. It’s happening. Boom. Paradigm shift.

Doug Amsbary’s son-in-law Robert Cavin shared something in common with Doug. Doug grew up with a single mom. He never knew a dad. As a college student, he committed his life to Christ. Soon after he married (over thirty years ago), he determined to give his own children what he never had – a loving, caring father. One who would be available. A provider. An encourager. A counselor. A disciplinarian (yes, that too). A coach. A cheerleader.

When Doug walked his daughter Laurie down the aisle seven years ago, he gave her hand to a promising young man: Robert Cavin. Robert also grew up with a single mom and no dad. Robert’s new father-in-law Doug was the first man ever to play the role of "father" in his life. For seven years, Robert cherished what he never had – a dad. Doug was a good dad.

Last week, cancer took the life of Doug Amsbary. He was only sixty years old.

Boom. Paradigm shift.

With paradigm shift, everything changes.

Galileo thought Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was right. The great philosopher Aristotle taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and that all other celestial bodies, including the moon, the planets and the sun all circled the earth – which remained stationary. Ancient Greeks and Romans, Chinese, African kingdoms and Native American cultures all held to the same geocentric view. Copernicus challenged that view and made the radical suggested that the sun was at the center of the "solar system," and like the other planets, the earth rotated around the sun.

It was a profound paradigm shift. His twenty-five years of research was summarized in a volume he published in 1543. Most of the world ignored it.

Until Galileo. Though inquisitorial censors sentenced him to prison in 1633 for teaching the theories of Copernicus, the proverbial genie was out of the bottle. In spite of the religious objection, we now understand the realities of the solar system. There is no turning back.

It was a scientific paradigm shift.

Dr. Benjamin Rush was a physician. He was a patriot. A signor of the Declaration of Independence. He believed in a uniform theory of medicine. All diseases, he said, came from a single source. He graduated from Princeton and then the Medical School at the University of Edinburgh. He practiced medicine in London and Paris. Then at the College of Philadelphia he trained three thousand students in the school of chemistry in his unique method of health care. In 1790, his lectures were the toast of the town, drawing curious and cheering crowds from all over the city.

He taught that all disease could be traced to fever caused by "over stimulation of the blood vessels." His simple remedy: "depletion." Bloodletting.

Dr. Rush was later proven wrong. His drastic treatment proved to have no value whatsoever. His straightforward, uncomfortable, "heroic" therapy was abandoned as useless, worthless… and harmful.

Paradigm shift. Thank goodness.

Pastor Danny Carroll needed classroom space. The church just kept on growing. He needed a larger worship center and a student center for high school and middle school age teenagers. The younger children were crowded too. The staff was restricted in their ability to care for the little ones because of inadequate space.

A large facility in town fell into bankruptcy - a mental health hospital. The designers of the hospital believed that there would be government money and insurance reimbursement sufficient to make such a care center profitable. No expense was spared. There was a gymnasium. A swimming pool. A full service commercial kitchen. Therapy rooms. Hospital beds. Conference rooms. Classrooms. All state-of-the-art.

And then a government policy changed. Subsidies dried up. No insurance materialized as reimbursement for treatment. The hospital went bust. And sat empty for several years.

Until Pastor Carroll got a vision. The facility would undergo a complete paradigm shift.

A mental health hospital became a church.

I toured the facility on Thursday morning this week. The "lock up" is now a library. The conference room now accommodates a pastoral staff and church leaders in planning a program of Bible teaching and spiritual well-being and leadership development. Uplifting music now fills the rooms.

Gone are the guys in white jackets carrying clipboards. The orderlies no longer walk the halls. The locks have disappeared. If a Cuckoo’s Nest type Nurse Ratchet ever worked there, she’s history.

The sterile hospital smell has given way to a bright, cheerful coat of paint. Young people shoot baskets in the gym. Children’s playthings now fill the rooms once occupied by psychotherapists in group session. A drum set and sound system and electronic keyboard sit in the corner of the room for high school students. There’s a ping-pong table and pool table and foosball table in the youth center. The stainless steel kitchen appliances now host concerts and banquets and youth rallies.

It’s a beehive of activity.

It is a paradigm shift in the delivery of health care.

* * * * *

Leaders encounter paradigm shift in one of two ways. It can be either voluntary or involuntary.

In the first case, it’s because you choose to take a different perspective. The glass is no longer half empty, it’s half full. It’s your choice.

In the second, you’ve got no choice at all. You must deal with an unavoidable, inescapable new reality.

But notice this. In either case, paradigm shift presents a new opportunity. A new challenge. It’s your response to it that makes all the difference.

Today, you are facing many of the same routines, the same procedures, the same attitudes. And you are wondering why you are not making any progress. Perhaps it’s time for change.

There’s another possibility. Could be this morning, you are waking up to crisis. You had no control. No one consulted you. You were blindsided. It came out of no-where, and this morning you are looking at a set of variables you could not have anticipated. Not even a crystal ball would have helped.

The only thing certain is that your world is facing dramatic change. You have no idea what this thing is going to look like in the next few months – or weeks – or days.

It is a present reality - change may be exhilarating. And exciting. But it is also fearsome.

Grandma Dorothy is now with Grandpa Charlie and the Lord. She was ninety-two when she died five years ago.

She was born in London just after the turn of the last century. King Edward VII of England employed her father at Buckingham Palace. Little Dorothy was only eight years old when a member of the Palace Guard appeared on the front door of their little flat. He brought terrible news. That day, while working on one of the King’s carriages at Buckingham’s Mews, her father fell to the floor dead of a sudden heart attack.

Despondent, Great Grandma Barrett took her only child to the docks where they boarded a transatlantic ocean liner, perhaps from the British White Star Line or one of the magnificent Cunards, leaving England for the New World. The year: 1910. They certainly bunked on the lower decks. (Just two years later, the Titanic was launched and then sank in the icy waters of the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage.)

In the Roaring Twenties, Dorothy and Charlie met and soon after married in Toronto, Canada. Their attempt at farming flopped. Off they went to the big city to pursue a new life. In Chicago they found work, a home and they found the Lord. She named one her two sons after the King who reigned over Great Britain the year her father died: Edward.

Grandma was a godly woman. When she prayed, she employed the King’s English – a form of the language she learned from her Schofield Reference Bible (The King James Version, 1611). I was her first grandson. She taught me her favorite verse in that Bible. To this day, I can both hear her say the words and see her handwritten text – penned by her own aging hand in tiny box lettering.

"Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not on thine own understanding. In all thy ways, acknowledge Him, and He shall direct Thy paths." (Proverbs 3: 5,6 KJV)

For those of us caught in the vortex of paradigm shift – Grandma Dorothy gave good advice.